Making Leafy Greens Salads More Vegan

There are times in our area we live in that we run across clients with special dietary needs.  For our menus, we are sensitive, and tend to shy away on being too heavy on platters that rely on gluten and nuts for flavor.  As a business, it can be easy to fall into a rut that serves basically all the items that people crave.  Go to any food truck event, and it would be hard to find a salad cart. 

For all the effort we put into turning a meal into a welcome showcase for all who attend, there comes the fact that even with a blanketed best effort, there are still clients that don’t fit the necessary tweaks.  And this is especially true for continuing events for the same group of people.  We have a group that we cater twice a month for and there are a fair number of gluten free vegans.  When we started to serve a more balanced menu to account for all the nuances, we found we were still falling short.  It’s is great to get ten compliments, but it is important to not neglect the one critique that comes next and to look into it as insight as to how to consider it could make things tastier.

And this is in regards to our leafy green salad choices.  Normally,  a salad is a great start to an entire meal. It is light, is full of vegetables for nutrition, and offers a bunch of contrasts with its dressing, crunch, and seasonal selection of fruits or market vegetables.  On the contrary, if the salad was to become your main dish due to other platters being restricted because they contained ingredients you abstained from eating, a leafy green salad does not become very filling on its own.

We have added composed salads to be more robust and filling for this reason, but there are still clients in this group that just can’t handle some of the items in those salads from week to week.  So leafy green salads got an upgrade.  Each time we prepare our salads for the group, on top of our seasonal fruit, and cheese on the side, and dressing on the side, we are incorporating legumes.

Beans and lentils are adding more to the party. They can be creamy like cheese. They add a new flavor palette to the mix. And the come packed with necessary proteins to fulfill the vegan wish list of compete meal satisfaction.  This week we featured our spinach pear salad, that comes with dried cranberries and toasted hazelnuts, and we added a slow cooked beluga black lentil that started with a sofrito of onions, carrots, celery and garlic. The resulting add in of lentils really boosted the dish to a level that could stand on it’s own.  

So I am looking forward to see how other beans will adapt to our recipes and give the leafy green salads a hefty boost.  Maybe you will get to try one too in the future.